After he left office in December, former Mayor Jerry Sanders and his wife took a three-month trip to Italy. He left his phone behind and his wife imposed a news blackout on her husband.

But Sanders couldn’t help himself and he took a look at the local news in San Diego one day on his iPad. He read about the raging dispute his successor, current Mayor Bob Filner, was having with hoteliers over tourism marketing revenue — a nearly 40-year deal Sanders thought had been finalized during the last days of his tenure.

“I went out and walked 10 more miles and I’d already walked 15 that day,” said Sanders, an avid walker. “It just created a little bit of angst.”

That’s just one of several pillars of Sanders’ mayoral legacy that took hits while he was walking the Italian countryside. From managed competition to pension reform to a plan to makeover Balboa Park, events now out of Sanders’ control have chipped away at his list of accomplishments in recent months.

In an interview, Sanders said he’s not concerned about his legacy and he remains confident that many of the initiatives he started will still be successful in the end despite setbacks.

“They only gave me two terms,” he said. “…So we can only push that rock so far and then it’s up to others to carry that forward.”

Sanders continued, “Even if all those fail, I still think that we went in at a (rough) time and we right-sized the government. We eliminated a lot of positions and the city seems to be working pretty well right now. …So I feel very good about that because we’re in a very different place seven years later.”

Decades of neglect and mismanagement by past city leaders had made San Diego a national symbol for bad government and led The New York Times to dub the city “Enron-by-the-Sea” because of its pension scandal. Sanders inherited that mess in 2005 when he won a special election to replace former Mayor Dick Murphy, who resigned under duress.

Sanders is widely praised for improving the city’s financial fortunes with budget cuts, pension changes and pay cuts, among other things, despite the national recession that hit in 2008. However, he projected a budget surplus for the coming year that turned into a nearly $40 million deficit.

Carl Luna, a political-science professor at Mesa College, said Sanders had an ambitious agenda and his legacy won’t be hurt if some of the projects he launched fizzle after he left.

“If he had accomplished all of those, he’d have been one of the most successful mayors ever,” he said. “ …He’ll be remembered as a guy that came out of chaos and restored a semblance of order and good humor to City Hall, which will probably only grow on reflection with current animosities at City Hall.”

Others view the recent struggles of Sanders’ initiatives differently.

“His legacy is mired in litigation,” said Steve Erie, a UC San Diego political-science professor. “Clearly if these things all fail in the courts, it doesn’t help his legacy, it only diminishes it.”

To Sanders, the biggest disappointment since he left office is the failure of the $45 million plan for Balboa Park. The project — championed by Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs — would have created a bypass bridge to remove cars from Plaza de Panama and make it more pedestrian-friendly.

A Superior Court judge blocked the project in a Feb. 4 ruling because he said it violated the city law regarding permits for a substantial alteration to a historic resource.

Sanders said he thought the project was “legally sound in every way.”

“I don’t think that was a good ruling,” he said. “I think that was an opportunity to change Balboa Park in a positive way for future generations. Instead, we’ve still got that ugly parking lot and we lost a very philanthropic donor to the city who is giving that money to other organizations now.”

While some hope to revive the plan, Filner has proposed an alternative that would ban cars from Balboa Park’s central plaza on weekends but allow some traffic to continue on weekdays.

A week after that court decision, an administrative law judge with the Public Employment Relations Board ruled that Sanders violated state labor law by taking a proposed pension overhaul directly to voters rather than first negotiating the plan with employee unions. That decision puts the future of Proposition B — which replaced guaranteed pensions with 401(k)-style plans for most new city hires — in doubt although a final appellate court decision could be years away.

Sanders said he knew that PERB would issue an adverse ruling against the city regardless of the facts and he looks forward to a court ruling.

“I think we’ll win in court,” he said. “I think that judges are hesitant to set aside such an outpouring of support by the public.”

The initiative, which voters approved in June of last year and essentially closes the pension system to most new workers, also threw a wrench in Sanders’ promise that he would hand his successor a budget without a structural deficit. Implementing Proposition B forces the city to pay off its $2.2 billion debt faster and therefore contributed to the city’s annual pension payment increasing by $44 million for the coming year.

However, if Proposition B stands, it is projected to save the city nearly $1 billion over the long term.

The initiative left Filner with the task of closing a nearly $40 million deficit in the city’s $1.2 billion operating budget rather than a clean slate.

Another key initiative championed by Sanders — managed competition — has been put on hold by Filner. The process that pits city workers against private bidders in a competition to provide certain services is credited with saving the city $12 million annually if Filner follows through on bids started under Sanders. Filner has agreed to do that but wants to study the program before initiating any further competitions.

The dispute over tourism marketing revenue surprised Sanders because he thought it was a done deal when he left office. At issue was a contract with the Tourism Marketing District to collect and spend a 2 percent surcharge on hotel rooms that generates roughly $30 million annually.

Sanders signed the City Council resolution approving the pact in his final week as mayor, but the agreement required further signatures from the mayor that Filner refused to sign for months. Filner finally signed the deal Thursday after several changes were made.

“I thought it was done so when I read that it wasn’t I was a little bit surprised, to be very honest with you,” Sanders said. “I was signing stuff until the second I left and that just wasn’t one of them obviously.”

Sanders, who is now CEO of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, went with Filner and many others on a four-day trip to visit business leaders in Mexico City earlier this month. He said the two talked generally about city operations.

“He and I are the only two that have ever had the strong-mayor job so there’s not really a big group of people you can go talk to about it,” Sanders said. “I think that he feels now how large it is and he’s understanding a lot of the issues so I think it’s a learning process. My first six months were pretty rocky, too, I have to tell you. You’re learning a new job. You’re trying to do things. You don’t know what your power is, what it’s not.”

Filner, who has a reputation as a polarizing politician, has butted heads with the City Council and City Attorney Jan Goldsmith over policy issues and appointments in his short tenure. Asked for his thoughts on how Filner was doing, Sanders was diplomatic.

“You know I don’t agree with Bob on a lot of issues, but what I think is he’s got the best interests of San Diego in mind from his perspective,” he said. “And I don’t have any problem with that.”

Sanders added, “They elected somebody with a very different style and Bob’s never tried to hide his style. So now I’m amazed that anybody’s surprised by that. I’m not apt to change at 62 and he’s not apt to change at 70. I mean, we are who we are.”